After the flood of Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10 reviews, here is a review of PC-BSD 1.3 Beta. "PC-BSD has improved quite a bit and the use of its open-source PBI packaging system is a great idea. Although it obviously means there might be a minor delay in newly released products being ported over to the PBI package system, novice users will rejoice because the wait is well worth it. PC-BSD is a well oiled machine with its quick response times, even if you don't have that much memory in your system. Its implementation of a clean interface is welcomed by me and not having a 3D enabled desktop is not something I really would worry about unless you are an eye-candy lover."

Why is this an either-or situation? You don't solve the dependency problem by banning dependencies. Windows can use local per-app DLLs, but mostly shared libaries are installed in shareable locations. And Windows users deal with this just fine. Even though they "don't even know what a lib or dependency is"! Really!

You can have your one-click installs AND shared libraries at the same time.

p.s. Class exercise: multiply the number of executables on the system by the size of all shared libraries present.

"""Why is this an either-or situation? You don't solve the dependency problem by banning dependencies."""

I commend you on your sanity. OK. Maybe sanity is something that we can take for granted of the participants in *most* threads on OSNews. (And then again... maybe not.) But in this one, it is definitely worth noting. ;-)

You can have your one-click installs AND shared libraries at the same time.

Actually that's how PBIs work - and I say this as a ex-PBI maintainer (no time these days). PBIs are a nice way of avoiding the user-visible dependency part of package management, while relying on those libraries that are expected to be present on all PC-BSD installs. For example, I didn't have to include kdelibs/qt (and all suppported libraries) in the Scribus PBI. No matter how many times you repeat the same lines over and over, PBIs is not an either/or solution. Do some math: the openoffice PBI is 93Mb. How large it would be if you included every library that it needs? It doesn't, because it assumes the presence of certain libraries (like xorg). Yes, PBI's are more self-contained than regular RPM or DEB packages, because you have the ability to include libs that are not necessarily included in the default install, but that doesn't mean - like you erroneusly assume - that they banned dependencies. Having a PC-BSD system installed is a dependency itself if you think of it, and almost all progs present on a PC-BSD install can be relied on when you build PBIs.